What I Was Page 8

  I got up and browsed the stalls but retraced my steps quickly, too excited by the prospect of the weeks ahead to miss out on Finn’s return. He still wasn’t there.

  Boss-lady offered me a thoroughly unpleasant smile. I didn’t want to know what she made of my presence here. It wouldn’t have occurred to Finn to wonder.

  ‘Must be boring for you hanging about. Has anyone ever looked at your future?’ Her voice was slick as hair grease and I remembered the snake from Jungle Book even as I struggled to understand her meaning. Was she offering me a job in the civil service? But then it clicked and I recoiled in horror. Was it possible that she actually told fortunes?

  I shook my head, no, embarrassed by this obvious ploy to extort money. Did I really need to be told I would meet a dark lady and settle down in a town beginning with ‘S’? My future seemed too obvious to bother predicting. Finn’s fortune would have been more interesting – I couldn’t imagine how he would ever be anything but sixteen, anywhere but in that hut by the sea, his face and limbs any more or less graceful than they were now. It was like imagining a future for Peter Pan.

  ‘Come with me.’ She laid a hand like a pig’s trotter on my shoulder and I searched frantically for Finn.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘There’s time.’

  The fact was, I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know that I was running out of life, that hard times lay ahead, that I was unlucky in love. I didn’t want to know that all my money would be stolen from me by the one I loved most, that trust would turn out to be laced with deceit, that nothing was what it seemed, that my life would be riddled with bonuses disguised as catastrophes, or vice versa.

  It was all too obvious in my case anyway.

  ‘Never mind,’ she said caressingly, ‘we’ll have a cup of tea while you wait.’

  With no hope of escape, I followed her into the market cafe with its proud announcement of today’s specials: pork chops and custard pie. I sat across from her at the table nearest the door while an ancient crone brought the tea.

  ‘Let me look at you,’ she said, when the thick white teacups had been placed on the table.

  Although her face was squashy as a pudding, the eyes set within it were glittering and hard. She fixed me with them and my heart stopped beating; it was only after some seconds that I remembered to keep breathing, and exhaled.

  ‘There’s a girl,’ she said without preamble.

  Of course there’s a girl, I thought, performing the mental equivalent of eye rolling. Beautiful, like a princess, with a fat baby on each hip. I felt like laughing out loud.

  She gave a little shrug of annoyance. ‘Concentrate.’ It was not a request. She held up the little glass salt cellar from the table and I looked from her to it.

  Oh, great, I’m about to be hypnotized and kidnapped now, sold into slavery as a… but exactly what would I be useful for? I stared at the salt cellar and once more nearly laughed when I thought about all the noise in my brain, and what she’d said, and it occurred to me that she was probably right, there were too many thoughts, too many sides to every object and every single person, too many attempts to make sense of it so that I always ended up confused and distracted and somehow out of control, whereas salt, a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife, or was it Orpheus, someone turned into a pillar of salt by looking back when he? – she? – wasn’t supposed to. And while I was thinking all this, a picture came into my head, of a face, not altogether human, and rippled as if separated from me by a thick plate of glass. It was a girl and I knew her the way you know someone in a dream, a familiar packaging of misinformation. Her hands came up, strong hands with long narrow fingers, and touched my face and the experience was so startling in its clarity that I could actually feel her fingers pressing lightly just above my cheekbones, and when I looked out from the image I realized it was the old woman’s hands on my face, and I jumped back, confused and horrified.

  ‘How interesting.’ Her voice was light and without inflection, like someone blowing gently through a tube.

  The face reappeared for an instant in my head, in ripples, indistinct.

  And then it was gone, and the witch had her fingers wrapped round the salt so I could no longer see it, and she looked at me and nodded, though I didn’t say anything. I was back in the outside world, sitting at a table in the cafe while my tea grew cold.

  Finn’s witch stared at me and her face had a new dimension. Was it compassion? Pity? She shook her head, narrowed her eyes and pointed a gnarled finger at me, gently tapping the centre of my forehead.

  ‘Look more carefully,’ she said.

  I blinked and realized that was it; that was my fortune. Trotting after her into the market, I wanted to ask questions, but she ignored me as thoroughly as if we’d never spoken.

  Which brings me to my next rule, written with hindsight and a certain hard-won wisdom.

  Rule number six: There are clues everywhere.

  Finn arrived a minute later, and when we left, Witchy handed him his money, and sent him off with a wave. I might have been invisible.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Finn asked, nearly as soon as we set off. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  I could have laughed at the appropriateness of the old cliché, but the ability to see the funny side had temporarily deserted me. I wanted to tell him about the uninformative fortune and the strange floating image, but I waited and waited for the right moment and for some reason it never came.

  We walked briskly in the pale light, travelling single file along the footpath that skirted the school gates. Pale furled leaves and dazzling sunshine scoured my brain of dark visions. When we reached the water, the ebb tide was running strong, but instead of the kayak, Finn dragged a little dinghy out of its hiding place. I hadn’t seen it before and despite its advanced state of disrepair, I was touched that he had considered the fact that there would be two of us crossing, and prepared for it – concrete evidence that I had entered his consciousness at a time when I was not actually standing in front of him. A thrilling discovery – like seeing a chimp make tools.

  I helped him pull the heavier boat down from the dunes, wondering how hard it had been for him to get it up there in the first place. He stowed my bag in the bow while I clambered in as gracefully as possible, squinting into the sun. Finn pushed off, waded in a little and stepped lightly over the side, picking up the oars as he settled. The land rushed away from us at speed; all he had to do was steer in the direction of the little peninsula. The tide swept us out towards the sea, and then suddenly the momentum stopped and we were out of the current, becalmed. With a few lazy pulls of the portside oar, Finn guided us slowly to shore and I scrambled out to help him drag the boat up behind the shack.

  My whole being was focused on trying to remain cool, pretending that spending two weeks without adults, without school, without authority or structure of any kind with my best (my only) friend was an ordinary occurrence. Impossible, of course. My head and stomach felt odd, my hands trembled, I had forgotten how to speak normally and was too agitated to eat.

  Finn never seemed to notice my failures of poise, which surprised me. I had never in my life entered a room without instantly forming an impression of what everyone in it was doing and thinking. It was as natural as breathing to me, and I wondered if his ignorance were wilful.

  The menu that night featured Finn’s fish stew (stew, I had learnt, was his main area of culinary expertise), dished into large bowls with a teacup in lieu of a ladle. I could make out potatoes, carrots, crab, mussels and a mix of fishes, but suspected they were only the beginning; all manner of monsters were routinely dredged up from the bottom of the sea and served for tea courtesy of my host. But it tasted excellent.

  The sense of occasion was such that we carried our food outside and ate leaning against the front of the house in the late golden light with the gentle lapping of waves in the background. Finn’s little cat hung around, curling up on his lap for warmth. As I sat and tried to eat, my nerves
seemed to flow out with the sea and I began to feel calm.

  We sopped up the end of the stew with bread and sat back, sated, with no one to insist on prayers or protocol, and nothing at all to do before the next course, if we decided to have one.

  When it came time for dessert, I brought out a cake, the last one left in the bakery, this time decorated with a clown in blue and green icing. I pulled the clown’s head off and used a blunt knife to cut the cake into more or less wedge-shaped chunks. Finn accepted his without enthusiasm, having lived for years without jam and sweets, but for me, at that moment, cake had no equal on earth.

  Licking icing off my fingers, I asked about our assault on the fort. I knew it would require an early start to hit the tide right. We didn’t want to fight a vicious current on top of everything else.

  ‘We won’t have long,’ Finn said, ‘but we might catch a glimpse of it.’ He seemed excited by the possibility, like a child, and I revelled in this unexpected show of enthusiasm.

  We sat for a long time in the dark, watching the beam of a lighthouse flash, hypnotic and reassuring, accompanied by the toll of a buoy. The tide seemed particularly low tonight; the beach stretched far away from us and the waves lapped quietly in the distance. I guessed it had to do with the full moon.

  ‘Is it true that you can still hear bells under the sea?’ My question referred to the legend, popular at school, that the bells of the churches from the lost city could be heard on quiet summer nights. Naturally, I was convinced of the absurdity of such a notion.

  ‘Of course,’ Finn said, without turning his head.

  I looked at him sideways to see if he was serious, but nothing in his face offered a clue. For the next half-hour, until the temperature dropped and drove us inside, we sat in silence. I listened as hard as I could for the magic, but heard nothing but the clang clang clang of a buoy.

  17

  The sound of Finn boiling water woke me at dawn. He wasn’t much for talking, especially at that hour, and wouldn’t answer any conversation I initiated. Like the hut, he warmed up slowly, and I had a feeling his habit of solitude had existed for so long that it surprised him every morning to find me asleep where his granny had once lain.

  It occurred to me that I had been at boarding school for a good many more years than Finn had lived alone, so perhaps my social skills were a little on the odd side as well. Whenever I was at home, I watched my mother chat brightly over breakfast the way an anthropologist might note typical social behaviour of the human species.

  I hated getting up in the cold, and slept buried up to my eyes in blankets, removing them only to wrap my hands round a warm cup of tea. Finn had added sugar to mine unprompted and I turned away to hide my flush of pleasure. I knew that if I waited in bed for him to build up the fire and perform his morning tasks, the hut would gradually fill with a kind of fuggy warmth, so I lay still, savouring the familiar sounds and postponing re-entry into full consciousness for as long as possible.

  Nothing in my life so far compared with those first minutes of the day, half-sitting in bed, still swaddled in warmth and with no imperative to move, just staring out of the window as the first pale streaks ignited the sky. I watched boats chug slowly past the windows: fishing boats returning from a long night of work, sailing boats from the nearby estuary taking advantage of the favourable tide, little tugs on their way back to port. At night passenger ships twinkled on the horizon like stars, but the daylight made them invisible.

  ‘We’ll take the dinghy,’ Finn said over his shoulder, heading out of the door. Through the window I watched him go, watched his outline soften and blur as he disappeared into the morning haze. The world had not yet come into focus. Even the sound of the sea seemed muffled, as if heard from a long distance away. From where I sat it was nearly invisible, lost in a cloak of grey mist. I knew this moment of half-light wouldn’t last, that in less than an hour daylight would have burned off the fog and restored the shape of things.

  When I finally dressed and joined him, he was outfitting the little boat for our expedition: a wooden mast and sail retrieved from the dunes, a long coiled rope, a tin for bailing, an anchor. The sun blazed down and I knew that my thick jersey would soon feel uncomfortably warm.

  Finn hauled up the little sail, swung the boat into the wind and pointed to where he wanted me. I climbed in at the bow and with a push and a jolt we were off, Finn handling the tiller and sail, and me singing pirate songs and ‘What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor?’ to amuse him.

  He frowned at me. ‘I’m doing all the work while you sit there making a horrible noise.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said happily, delivering a lusty chorus at twice my usual volume.

  Finn grimaced. ‘Come on, let’s switch over. That ought to shut you up.’

  ‘I can’t sail.’

  ‘I’ll teach you.’

  And suddenly there it was. The smile.

  Awkwardly, we swapped places. Finn handed me a rope and a length of tiller and told me to hold both steady. ‘Feel for the balance between them,’ he told me.

  I had no idea what he meant, and at first I struggled against wind and waves with every ounce of strength I possessed. To no avail. We proceeded in fits and starts, jerking along like an old car in the wrong gear, stopping and starting and swinging awkwardly left and right. Finn leant back and focused on the middle distance, smiling a little and refusing to help, and just as I was ready to give up, our forward motion turned tight and clean and straight and suddenly, against all expectation, we were sailing. I was sailing! The little boat sped along and together we soared, with the slap of the sea against the bow, the wind coming over the port side nearly in front of us, the sail taut as a trampoline. Speed and a slim wedge of terror made me reckless, ecstatic, for the three or four minutes it took before I headed the boat up too close to the wind and lost hold of the tiller. My moment of oneness with wind and sea ceased. The momentum of the boat jammed the tiller up into the far corner of the stern where I couldn’t hope to reach. I hung on to my rope for dear life, despite the fact that the boat was now tipped up at a terrible angle, hurtling along, taking water in over the side.

  ‘Let go of the sail!’ I could hear Finn shouting, but my limbs had gone rigid, my eyes half-shut in a paralysed prayer for salvation, my hands locked obstinately around the rope. It took an almighty heave for him to pull the line from my hands and set it free, which had the magical effect of flattening the boat almost instantly. The tiller, suddenly loose and friendly, swung gently into his hand, and with a few minor adjustments we were sailing once more. He motioned me back to my place at the bow, uncharacteristically triumphant. If I hadn’t known better I might have suspected him of proving a point: something about the very thin line between positive forward motion and chaos, panic, death.

  Then again, maybe not.

  Trying to think inside Finn’s head was like committing what our English master called Pathetic Fallacy, the attribution of human emotions to boulders or trees. Finn was more likely thinking about the not-so-thin line between someone who knew how to sail and someone who didn’t.

  But I harboured no ill feelings; ballast was a role I embraced happily. By now the wind had picked up and I leant over the side, hypnotized by the flashes of sunlight on the dark sea as it rushed under our bow, by its green-black opacity. We’d been sailing north along the coast, out less than an hour, and already I’d forgotten our goal.

  ‘Look there.’ Finn pointed left at a shallow cove surrounded by collapsing cliffs – great shelves of chalk and clay sliding down on to the beach. ‘That’s where the habour was.’ I turned to look, squinting to focus better, while he neatly changed direction, angling the boat away from the shore.

  We were about three hundred yards off the beach when suddenly I could see something ahead, something dark and looming just above the water line. I pointed, but Finn had already altered our course. As we approached I could see that it was man-made, but by the time I recognized it as the fort, the sea was trying
to smash us to smithereens against it. Finn steered hard and swung us round the rampart as if it were a racing marker, an uncharacteristically reckless move, I thought, on the chance that there was substantially more Roman fort just under the surface.

  It sounds like one of those horrible clichés, but this barely visible construction of two-thousand-year-old stone made the hairs rise on the back of my neck. Ever the romantic schoolboy, I suppose I’d been expecting something pristine: light grey walls carved into tidy castellations like a plastic play-castle in the bath. But the reality of it was heavy and dark and shaped like a thing from a nightmare, covered in barnacles and seaweed, and so low in the water that it was nearly invisible except when the sea parted between waves and the light caught it a certain way.

  Fantasies I’d nursed about tossing a rope over a tower and stepping out of the boat to explore were laughable. The treacherous surge of the sea against those massive walls made such thoughts absurd. The only form of life that might cling to them belonged to limpets and mussels.

  Finn had removed us to a safe distance and now we drifted, the sail soft and luffing, spilling wind while we mulled over our position.

  He cocked his head at me, eyes sparkling with reflected sunlight. The corners of his mouth rose slightly, and if he could have leant back and crossed his arms over his chest, I think he would have.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s your fort.’

  There it was indeed. I strained for some sign of St Oswald’s monastery, the tiniest remnant of cloisters and arches perched on top of the leviathan. But if such a thing had ever existed, there was no sign of it now.

  Finn looked at me and shrugged. ‘What next?’

  Back at the hut that morning, safe in my warm bed, I had imagined slipping over the side of the boat and diving down, feeling my way along the smooth stone sides to the bottom, miraculously holding my breath until I neared the bottom, where a golden goblet and a crown would lie wafting softly in the sunlit sea, waiting for me to pluck them out and deliver them to Finn. I could see myself breaking back through the surface, spouting water like a whale and tossing the priceless treasure casually into the bottom of his boat as an offering.